Bucatini All'Amatriciana

There's one more recipe in the cookbook that utilizes the guanciale that I labored over and I decided to do it on the same night as the last post and make it my main meal for the evening. 

Bucatini all'amatriciana is a classic Italian pasta dish from the region of Lazio. There are some minor ingredient differences around Lazio where you'll find it, but it always includes guanciale, tomatoes, and pecorino cheese. 

Bucatini is a hard durum wheat pasta, thick and shaped like spaghetti, but with a hollow center. The name comes from the Italian word 'buca' meaning hole. I had to use my trusty Amazon.com to find it seeing how it was absent from any of my local shops. The special UPS delivery is really not necessary because there is nothing wrong with substituting spaghetti for the bucatini. I wanted to stay true to the ingredients in the cookbook, and having never cooked or eaten bucatini, I figured it was worth it to order it at least once for the sake of trying it.  

The ingredient list is a short one, but there is a little prep work that will need to be done in order to make this dish come together. I already have the guanciale so that's taken care of. I will need to make another batch of Mario's basic tomato sauce, though. I'm not going to go into details about how it's made as it was the subject of a previous post, but I will show you my pot of sauce. 

I made a double batch in order to freeze some for future recipes, which reminds me that my basic chicken stock is getting low too. Better put that on the list soon. 

Now I'm ready to dive in. Once you're at this point, the dish comes together super fast. First I bring a pot of salted water to a rapid boil. 

I then add the guanciale to a sauté pan over medium heat, cooking until most of the fat has rendered out. The meat then goes on to a paper towel to drain off the extra fat while I discard half of the fat from the sauté pan. 

I turn the heat up on the sauté pan slightly and cook garlic, sliced red onion, and red pepper flakes. 

The guanciale gets added back to the sauté pan once the garlic and onions are cooked. Some of the basic tomato sauce is added and simmered for about ten minutes. 

While this is happening I drop the bucatini into the boiling water. It'll take a good nine minutes to cook, bucatini is a big pasta. 

Once cooked, the bucatini is added to the sauté pan and tossed with the sauce. It is finished with parsley and fresh grated pecorino Romano, the traditional sheep's milk cheese for this recipe. 

I plate a dish for myself and my wife. 

We had leftover peasant bread from the last post and gorged until our plates were licked clean. It's amazing how some of the simplest recipes are often the best. Babbo still has this on their menu and it's easy to see why. Do yourself a favor if you make it though, get real guanciale. Or better yet, make it like I did. Regardless, this is one of the easiest pasta recipes in the book. Until next time...